When Heroes Fall (Anti-Heroes in Love 1)

She took a small sip of the thick crema on the coffee and hummed her pleasure.

I followed suit, but the coffee, good and strong, tasted like mud on my tongue.

“So much more patient than I would have given you credit for, Ms. Lombardi,” Yara said with only a trace of a smile. “I know you must be bursting to question why I brought you here.”

“I have a feeling it wasn’t for the coffee, as good as it is,” I demurred.

Her lips twitched. “Astute. No, I brought you here for two reasons. The first is to tell you a story.” She paused, studying me so intently I could track the way her gaze mapped my features, drawing a line down my straight nose, over the arch of my brows, tunneling into my eyes. “When I was a girl, I fell in love with an Italian while I was on a summer abroad in Rome.”

My eyebrows hiked into my hairline. That was not how I thought the conversation would start.

“I was so young, barely nineteen, but I knew the moment I saw him that he should be mine. He had that Italian hair, you know? Thick and silken, so lush and curling I could already imagine my hands carding through it as we kissed.” She laughed, and it was an easy sound, a strange one coming from so calculated a woman. “He noticed me a moment later, and I knew when we locked eyes that he wanted me. So, when he approached, I went with him easily. He was funny, and I liked the way he was always using his hands to tell me things in ways his mouth could not. There was such confidence in him it made me feel important to be next to him.”

She paused to take a sip of espresso, and I was struck by an overlay of her as that young girl, a beautiful Persian intrigued by the different culture and beauty of the Italian boy.

“My family hated him, of course, when they found out we were going together. I only told them because I fully intended to marry him. I was in law school, but I wanted to drop out and move permanently to Italy. I wanted to drink wine with him in Piazza Navona every night for the rest of my life and have his babies. My parents told me if I didn’t at least finish my degree, they would never talk to me again. I figured, what is one more year in the grand scheme of life and our love? So, I returned to America at the end of the summer, and we wrote letters to each other every day for the next six months.”

Her smile was sad, but then, I’d already known it would be a tragic story.

“I was graduating in three weeks when I got a phone call from Donni. His father needed money. Their butcher shop was struggling, and the bank wouldn’t give him a loan. So, he’d gone to the local capo of the Camorra and asked him. Not only did they give Signore Carozza the loan, they also offered Donni a job.”

My chest tightened with dread as I realized where this was going, that I was hearing yet another story about how the mafia had destroyed a life.

“Like any American girl, I’d watched movies about the mafia, but I didn’t really understand the intricacies of the institution. I didn’t know enough to ask Donni not to work for them. He started to make good money, saving to buy a house for us when I moved back.” She sighed, pain stale in those beautiful dark eyes, lip lax with remembered sorrow. “He’d only been working with them for a month when he was in a car accident.”

I frowned, my mouth opening as if I could correct her because I had been sure that wasn’t where the story was going to go.

Yara’s mouth tightened in recognition of my shock. “He was just twenty-three, and he was hit straight on by a drunk driver. There was massive damage, including trauma to his brain. When I flew out to Rome after getting the call, it was to visit Donni in the hospital, and he was hooked up to life support. He was in a coma, and the doctors didn’t have much hope he would recover.”

Tears glistened in her eyes, but her voice was strong, her eyes almost wild with mad intensity as she leaned across the table and grabbed my hand tightly in her own. “The Camorra paid for his hospital fees, to keep him alive for as long as Signore Carozza and I needed to say our goodbyes. Their women brought flowers every single day until Donni’s room was like a garden. The capo himself visited while I was there, a handsome, strong man with more power in his little finger than I’d ever seen in another man’s entire body. He took my hand and he promised me he would take care of Signore Carozza and his family until the day he died. He told me that even though he’d only known Donni for a short time, he knew in his bones he’d been a good man and would have made me a good husband. Apparently, my Donni talked about me all the time.”